Carry on carillons

i've been meaning to write a post on this for quite some time now. but as you can see, i've been true to my nom de plume, atleast on the blog. i found out about carillons quite by accident. i
hadn't even heard of them before. but discoveries are more beautiful when you aren't looking for them in the first place.

i was walking in the lovely Tiergarten woods in Berlin, and intended to walk upto the Siegessaule to take a closer look at the golden lady, when i heard faint chimes in the distance,
like church bells. curious, i took a detour and followed the sound instead, cutting through the
woods. As i went closer, the random chimes melded into a discernible classical melody. And in the clearing stood the source -- a tall bell tower. Only, it housed 68 bells! It was a carillon, a
musical instrument made up of a number of bells which ring at different notes. They are all wired to a wooden keyboard. A carilloneur sits within the belltower, and plays this by pounding on the keys with his fists and feet simultaneously (And you thought coordinating two-hand movements for the piano was hard!).


The 68-bell carillon


It was the most beautiful sound ever. Imagine all those bells ringing out a symphony! I got even luckier. There was a poster saying there would be a tour of the belltower in an hour's time, guided personally by the carilloneur himself. A German lady there told me,"These days, the carilloneur plays here very rarely. Only on special days and holidays. And the guided tour is even rarer. You came on a very good day."



So i perched myself on a stone stool nearby, listening as the bells pealed in perfect harmony,
ending in a resonating finale that reverberated in the air for long moments. Then Jeffrey Bossin, the 60-something carilloneur, came down the stairs and let us in. Higher and higher went the spiralling stairs (not for the dizzy!), along a long line of intricately arranged bells. The biggest bell was so huge, if you stood under it and stretched both arms outwards, you couldn't touch opposite sides with your fingertips (for the record, it weighed 7.8 tonnes).


The biggest of the 68 bells, weighing 7.8 tonnes


We finally reached the carilloneur's room, at about 2/3rds the height. Apart from the wooden
keyboard,there was a computer (!) in the corner, and just enough space for the six of us to huddle around his bench. The view outside was breathtaking - the Reichstag, the mayoral office, the Tiergarten stretch, you could see it all. But once Bossin began playing the carillon, i couldn't take my eyes off him. Those keys are not easy to play, you need to actually pound on them (i tried). as he played the music piece, his fists flew on the keys so fast they were a blur. I marvelled that he could play this way for several hours on end. "My doctor keeps pleading with me to stop. All that pounding, and climbing up and down towers does your heart no good, he says. I don't listen to him," he said matter-of-factly. Bossin had a friend who played the carillon well into his eighties. Another who, at 65, came down from the tower and died of a
heart attack. There's a finality to his voice, which says,"Either way, i'm bound to this".


Carilloneur Jeffrey Bossin plays the keyboard with fists and feet

The tragedy of carilloneurs is, they can never own their instrument, so they are always at the mercy of the administration. An administration which rarely respects a carilloneur's passion, let alone paying them their due. For all his performances, Bossin is paid nothing (he supports himself giving piano tutorials). Instead, the man-in-charge at the municipal authority simply finds the carillons noisy and would prefer them not played at all. The world over, there are only about 500 carillons left. And their musician community is full of out-of-work carilloneurs. An American lady carilloneur, a good friend of Bossin's, lost her job recently. In Germany too, carilloneurs are given short shrift. Unlike the German films and opera, carillons occupy
a lesser social position. "The German economy has not done well this year, and the government is compensating by tightening purse strings on the cultural front," one of my companions whispered to me.

Even historically, carillons were always in the shadow -- very few musicians wrote music specially for carillons. Those who did, in the late 19th century, are held in high regard by carilloneurs. Some others adapted piano pieces for the carillon. Bossin has a practice carillon keyboard at home -- it is exactly like the actual keyboard, except it is not connected to any bells. A mental image of this pugnacious man pounding away on his practice board only to produce silence saddened me.

Incidentally, this carillon is also computer-programmed to play automatically at a preset hour. Hence, the computer in the corner. Bossin is dismissive -- it plays all the keys uniformly. The computer does not know when to play gently and when loud. All nuances are lost, he says.

The original carillon in Berlin was built by a Prussian monarch some hundred years ago, along with another in the nearby Potsdam. He had seen them on a visit to Holland (carillons are originally Dutch) and wanted to replicate them in Germany. The second World War destroyed both. This tower - the largest in Europe - was built by Daimler Benz in 1987. Bossin was instrumental, both in lobbying for, and designing the carillon.

A note on how the carillon's bells are made. They were forged by the Dutch bell-makers, who wanted to make bells that also meant something, which could make music and not just peal. Each bell gives out a musical note depending on its thickness -- the lower the note, greater the thickness. The problem is, once you forge it, you cannot alter the bell to a lower pitch. So the bell-makers would make all bells as thick as they could, and then file them precisely to produce the higher notes.

The carillon is not listed in the common tourist brochures of Berlin (atleast, i didn't find any).
But if you ever go there, do give it a shot. The carillon is close to the Institute of World Culture,
and walking distance from the Reichstag. The carillon is usually played on Sunday afternoons
during summer (technically, between April and October). You can hear it more than a kilometre away.